The present invention relates to robots and more particularly to electronic board configurations for robot controls.
Industrial robots are manufactured in a variety of designs and sizes to perform a wide variety of industrial production tasks. Hydraulic or pneumatic drive power can be employed to produce robot arm motion, but electric drive power is being employed increasingly.
In electric control systems, variations can occur from robot type to robot type in a number of ways including the number of joints to be driven, the size and type of joint drives (such as hydraulic or electric), the type of electric drive (such as DC brush type or DC brushless), the type of position feedback (incremental or absolute), the type of velocity feedback (tachometer or position change derived), etc.
Moreover, wide variations can occur in the work cell environment and the factory environment in which a particular robot is to be placed. For example, one or more robots may be grouped together to work on a coordinated basis possibly with other machines and controllers and with a variety of input/output devices. At the factory level, production management and coordination may require that supervisory computer control be placed on the individual robot or group of robots.
Finally, different users may have different needs with respect to the level and sophistication of control performance. Robot controls thus should have sufficient configuration flexibility to enable economic accommodation of the control configuration to variable control performance requirements.
To achieve performance and cost effectiveness and economy of manufacture for robot controls, it is thus desirable that robot controls be structured both to produce reliable and effective robot operation and to have sufficient flexibility and control and communication capability to enable ready and economic adaptation of the control for use with the wide variety of commercially available robots, for use in the wide variety of user work cell and factory environments, and for use with a performance control level suitable to the customer application. In short, it is desirable that robot controls be arranged both in software/ circuit architecture and in implementing electronic board configuration to be universal or near universal in application.
The incorporated-by-reference patent applications relate to a completely digital robot control that is provided with software/circuit architecture meeting the needs of universality. Much greater detail on the structure and operation of that digital control can be found in those applications. The present invention relates to a board configuration which implements the digital control and provides for flexible and economic packaging of different robot controls for different robots and/or different customer needs for like robots.